Quicker Than the Eye
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Average rating4.2
Quicker than the Eye is a major literary event, the first new collection in nearly a decade from America's preeminent storyteller. Here Ray Bradbury, at the height of his powers, displays with a sorcerer's skill the imagination and warmth that has earned him a well-deserved reputation as one of our greatest living writers. These twenty-one stories run the gamut from total reality to light fantastic, from high noon to long after midnight.
Amazing characters throng these pages: a man who creates symphonies from the songs of birds, a boy, now grown, who finds the one place where you can go home again, an ancient couple who compete in wild assassination games.
Here a lost life is redeemed by dance, a family detours down a sideroad of alternate futures, a Witch Door links two intolerant centuries, a woman and her husband are simultaneously renewed, molecule by molecule, every nine years, while the secret of growing young, and mad, is revealed.
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Some people can be a bit sniffy about Bradbury's later works, but this collection of stories from the 1990s is hugely enjoyable.
Bradbury is a superb prose stylist, easy to read, absorbing and these short stories each have a great idea at their core. But what he also does so well is steep some of his stories in nostalgia for a time long gone (whether that time actually existed is a moot point). Several stories here are set in the fictional small town America of his childhood, that golden past that never existed, the vanished America where everything was full of hope and cosy fireside warmth.
But there are also more off the wall ideas, such as the psychiatrist who is an ex-Uboat captain complete with periscope in his office! Or the time traveller who visits authors who, in their day, considered themselves failures, in order to show them how their works survived and were loved down the ages.
Honestly there's not a bad story here. Bradbury was one of the greats.
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